The majority of clothing sold today is mass produced in factories to limited standardized sizes. Typically, in retail shops, the customer finds a piece of clothing based on size marked on the clothing and then tries on several pieces of clothing to find the size that suits. However, in an online environment, e.g., in an online shop, the pieces of clothing cannot be tried on. Therefore, the online shopper can relay only on the size indicated by the clothing manufacturer. Unfortunately, there are many different systems of clothing measurements around the world, e.g., an international standard ISO 3635 (Size designation of clothes—Definitions and body measurement procedure), the European Union new standard EN 13402 (not yet in common use), and many national standards. In some countries like in the USA and in UK, different systems exist. Further more, systems of clothing measurement tend to change over time and have variations between manufacturers. The online shopper is left with very little guidance as to what size fits her best. Often, the online shoppers are not satisfied with the received pieces of clothing and they will return these items to the shop. For the online shop, returned items means lost profit, increased costs and reduced customer satisfaction. Therefore, there is a need for a system and method assisting the online shoppers to make better purchasing decisions.
Another commonly known observation is that virtually no two persons have an identical body shape or configuration. Thus, providing well fitted clothing, particularly suits for men and women, to each customer through the use of several pre-set standardized clothing sizes and without any alterations is nearly impossible. It is typical for retail establishments to fit each customer with clothing of an approximate size. Rarely does the clothing precisely fit the particular body configuration of the customer. Professional clothing salesperson will then typically mark the clothing for alteration and the clothing will be sent to a tailoring shop for adjustment. Thereafter, the customer must return to the retail shop to pick up the clothing. At that time, the customer will typically put on the clothing to have the clothing inspected in its finished form to insure that proper tailoring adjustments have been made. In cases where the measuring or tailoring functions were inaccurate, the clothing will be sent back again to the tailoring shop for further adjustment. This is obviously a cumbersome, time consuming and expensive task. In online environment, altering and fitting cannot be accomplished using traditional means.
Known alternative to the retail shop alteration process is to obtain accurate measurements of the physical body configuration of the customer prior to manufacture of the clothing (custom tailoring). There are two ways for carrying out the measurements. Using manual procedures involve the retailer taking only the measurements required for the individual product. Different approach is to use two or three dimensional scanner(s) to automatically measure the whole body in one step. The advantage of the second approach is that from one measurement set, the retailer can derive all measurements required to produce different types of clothing (e.g., shirts, trousers, jackets, etc). At the same time, this procedure is more expensive and requires a good investment in the scanner technology. Also, the retailer needs to be able to derive the individual measurement sets for products from the complete measurement data.
Several computer-aided design (CAD) systems have been developed for clothing industries, such as the E-Taylor project (see http://www.atc.gr/e-tailor/). These systems have limited usability. Even though the cuttings can be prepared based solely on the measurements taken from the customer (either by traditional means, or using advanced technology, such as the 3D body scanning), such system will not take into consideration that no human body is perfectly symmetrical and flawless. For example, due to posture flaws, person's one shoulder is often slightly higher than the other. In such situation, a good tailor would try to optically hide the flaw with the clothing. Also, the look of a piece of clothing strongly depends on the fabric used, i.e., how thick it is and how it falls. Therefore, even with the 3D body scanning and delivering the 3D image to the manufacturing location, the crucial part is still to try on a real piece of clothing on a real customer. Obviously, instead of trying the clothing on the customer, a mannequin, being an accurate representation of the customer, could be used.
One option, used in fashion and entertainment industry, is to manufacture a mannequin that is a duplicate of the customer's body. However, this approach is prohibitively expensive in most cases; also, most people do not order all their clothing from the same place, which further drives up the cost.
An alternative is to use adjustable mannequins so that the same mannequin can be adjusted for many customers. Mechanically adjustable mannequins (tailor's dummies) are known in customized tailoring. However, such mannequins are adjusted manually and the extent of their adjustability is limited. An adjustable mannequin that could be controlled by a computer is suggested (but not described) in U.S. Pat. No. 4,885,844. Described manually adjustable mannequin comprises a vertical support element and a series of elliptical, circumferentially adjustable elastic elements, both the major and minor axis of which can be adjusted using control bolt screws and a simple crank shaft screwdriver.
What are needed therefore, are systems and methods for custom tailoring in an online environment. Also needed is an adjustable mannequin that is computer controllable, so that the operator can adjust it automatically, semi-automatically or manually to accurately represent the customer's body.
Further more, there is a need for a mannequin that can not only be adjusted to represent realistically different sizes and shapes of customer's body, but also to move in a controlled manner to mimic characteristic movements of human body at the time of trying on and wearing the clothing to give more realistic view of how piece of clothing fits),